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Basics of Web Hosting • AllDigitalTalk

The online presence of any business is as important nowadays as its offline presence. Note that online presence is more important since it’s the face of your business which needs to be available 24×7. You could be using your web hosting provider for services like hosting your website, hosting your emails or any other business critical applications.

Imagine if any of these services are down due to web hosting provider issues it could create serious problems for any business. Thankfully there are many good web hosting providers that have good network availability and technical support. Since there are many options available you need to choose the hosting provider that best fits your business needs.

In this post, I will be giving your details on basics of web hosting like the types of web hosting, features of web hosting and some of the recommended web hosting providers.

What are Different Types of Web Hosting

Below are some of the most common types of web hosting you will come across

Shared Web Hosting

As the name suggests in this type of hosting you will be sharing all the services provided to you like web space, software, hardware and all the resources of a server are shared among hundreds or thousands of other users. Shared web hosting has its advantages and disadvantages. Shared hosts provide different packages and features.

Each provider has expertise in a specific domain like, for example, windows hosting, Linux hosting, WordPress hosting, e-commerce hosting and others, you can select the one depending on which scripts or software you prefer. Avoid hosting providers which promise unlimited web space, bandwidth at very cheap rates like $1.99 per month. As with this kind of providers, you are bound to face frequent issues as your website grows.

With shared hosting provider, you need to do some research about the support they provide. Do they have chat support or only ticket support? What are their turnaround times for ticket or issue resolution? Do they take hours or days to resolve issues? I would suggest you to do some check some web hosting forums, which provide real experiences of users of the particular hosting provider. Like for example you can go to one such reputed forum web hosting talk to check reviews and views of users of a particular web host.

Shared web hosting has many advantages one of them is that it is very cost effective. You get support for many scripts and content management systems like WordPress, Joomla and many more. If you are a web developer you can test different scripts and run multiple small sites on the same web hosting. Most of the shared hosting providers have a knowledge base to get help for any configuration settings or other issues. Also, you get all the support from the provider so that you can concentrate on your website and you need not worry about any server issues.

Shared hosting pricing starts from free (free hosting with ads which are not recommended) to $30 per month depending on the software and services you require. You can find good shared hosting providers with monthly pricing of $5 to $15.

Virtual Private Servers (VPS)

Virtual private server is a kind of a shared hosting wherein you get more dedicated web space, RAM, and database. You will still be sharing the resources but with a limited number of websites on a particular server. As VPS customer, you have root level access to their particular virtual machine so you can install any software that runs on that particular operating system instance. This is same as cloud hosting. You generally get limited support for this, and it’s better to go for VPS only if you know exactly the server resources you require.

If you have some experience with server administration and you are exactly sure about the resources required for your website then you can go for this type of hosting. Or else you can opt for a Managed VPS as per your requirement and obviously then the pricing for the package will go up. A self-managed VPS will provide you considerable savings as the pricing will be lower.

You can get an entry level VPS server for free at Amazon AWS which is fine for a small website with low traffic. At the higher end, the pricing per month can go up to $150 per month based on your server configuration.

Managed Dedicated Hosting

This type of hosting comes with many customizations based on your requirements. In this kind of setup the server is dedicated entirely to you and even configuration ie single core, dual core and quad core is set up according to your requirement. With managed hosting your entire infrastructure (hardware and software are supported on a day to day basis and covered by an SLA (service level agreement).

The managed hosting comes with many services depending on your requirement like security, storage, backups, databases, and other services depending on your custom requirements. Depending on your use of the hosting you can use managed hosting for Ecommerce (Magent and Oracle), Content management systems (WordPress, Drupal), Email (Hosted and Dedicated Exchange), Web Applications ( SaaS and Mobile applications) and Database (Big Data and Relational databases like Oracle, MySQL). Depending on the expertise of the hosting provider they provide total support for particular applications like wordpress, Magento, Databases, Sharepoint, Hosted Exchange and other applications. Hence you can choose the one that suits your application requirements.

You can also get dedicated bare metal servers which start from $100. These as the name suggests is a dedicated server for you to manage it yourself without any support. If you are a expert server admin then this is for you as it saves the cost that comes with other managed services of the hosting provider.

The pricing for this kind of setup can start from $200 per month and it can go up to thousands of dollars per month depending on your requirements. This kind of setup is recommended for you if you have a large website with high traffic or you manage the hosting of multiple clients. In case you manage hosting of multiple clients then you can set up their separate hosting accounts on one dedicated server and make good profit from this setup.

Cloud Hosting

Cloud hosting provides hosting for websites on virtual servers which pull their computing resource from distributed resources across multiple physical servers. This is different from VPS which is a single server split between a limited number of users. It follows the utility model in which you pay for what you use. This means you can use the services as much as you require, depending on the demands of your website and you will only pay for what you use.

One major advantage of this type of hosting is scalability, the cloud control panels are built with quick provisioning and deployment in mind. Hence you need not worry if your website is growing steadily; you can scale up the capacity of your webspace, database space or RAM on the cloud hosting as per your requirements. This hosting comes with redundancy which allows seamless transition to the other servers in a network in the event of hardware failure or any other issue. You are able to see a single server resource, but multiple systems are behind it.

The pricing for this kind of hosting is based on hourly usage, hence you pay less than a dollar per hour for some configurations. Since its pay per use model it all depends on what resources you are using and what customized softwares you are using. Generally the pricing for this is higher than the shared and VPS hosting, it can go even higher if you go for a managed cloud option.

Conclusion

I have i have been able to give you a fair idea about how to choose a web hosting provider as per your custom requirement. Request you to share the information on your social network. And would be glad to hear your experiences and feedback about web hosting providers.1

6 Comments

This is an amazing post Manish,
These are really the major hosting types out there on the internet and most bloggers usually start with the shared hosting type.
This is because it is usually the most affordable especially when you have a lean budget. But as time goes on and you've started making money from your site, it will get to a time when your site will outgrown the shared hosting you're using and in such a case, you will need to upgrade to another type.

Hi Mark,
At starting point, I suggest you go for a starter or a basic shared hosting plan from any of the recommended shared hosting providers. After that you can upgrade the plan as per your requirements. Let me know if you need any other help.

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